On October 6th, President Trump Trump issued a proclamation declaring October 9th to hereby be celebrated as Columbus Day. This proclamation has come in the wake of a heated nationwide debate on Columbus and his place within the mythos of the United States. Many cities around the country have opted to recognize “Indigenous Peoples Day” in its stead.

Numerous statues and monuments to the great explorer have also been vandalized recently, much in the same vein as the hysteric defecation of Confederate monuments that swept through the country just a couple of months ago.

The denunciation of Columbus has come mainly from the left-leaning portions of society. Universities, urban centers, the rich and elite of Hollywood. These people, who carry an oh-so-mighty air wherever they go, have deemed Columbus unfit to be recognized as a national hero any longer. Liberals always seem to like to focus on the bad parts of history.

While I do recognize and condemn the horrific acts Columbus performed on the Native populations of the Caribbean, I do not think that for this reason he should be completely thrown out of the history books of America.

His statues should not be torn down, his commemorative day should not be replaced by another. I say this not because he is a hero to the Italian-American community or for any other reason but one, his “discovery” of America.

I put discovery in parentheses because I acknowledge he didn’t truly “discover” the continent in a literal sense. Everyone knows Native Americans were here first, and also that Leif Eriksson landed in Canada in the 9th century. We do have a little appreciated Leif Eriksson Day already.

Also, I would gladly celebrate an Indigenous Peoples Day if it were celebrated on a different date of the year. I admire Native American culture and sometimes truly feel sorry that it is nearly dying out. What people seem to, or choose to, forget, however, is the everlasting effects of his voyages on the history of America and the world.

His voyages were the spark that paved the way for European settlement and colonization of the New World. He brought the new continent to the forefront of European interest and attention. (I also acknowledge that he landed in the Caribbean and not America proper, but this is again just another technicality.) Liberals and progressives tend to focus solely on the obviously awful parts of colonization such as slavery, diseases, the taking of ancestral homelands.

While these points are basically impossible to argue against as they are all true and awful, they are only part of the story. Europeans brought many good things with them to the New World and other regions of the globe they colonized. Technology, medicine, and higher standards of living to name a few.

European colonization ushered in the modern world that we now live in and take for granted today. The internet, vehicles, television, and not to mention the United States of America as we know it today! We live in the wealthiest country on Earth, more powerful and dominant than any other. We hold sway over much of the world’s affairs.

That is why we celebrate Columbus Day each year, and why we should continue to do so. Not to celebrate the deaths of Native Americans or even to celebrate him crossing the Atlantic (which is an astonishing feat in and of itself!), but to celebrate the “discovery” of the continent where the greatest nation to have ever existed on Earth would eventually be founded, the United States of America.